Help. I have to take some pictures at a retirement dinner. I have not seen the location, so I don't know how high the ceilings are. I will be using an A850 with a HVLF43 flash and probably a Minolta 24-85 lens. I don't do much flash work, and I'm trying to figure out if I can bounce the flash off the ceilings or will neet to use something like a Lite Scoop.

I've played a bit at home with bouncing the flash and using a lite Scoop. I don't see much, if any difference. Where can I find practical advice or guidelines on different flash situations? -- Without spending hours sifting through stuff left on the internet?

There are a couple of concerns with bouncing off of a ceiling. One, as you noted, is distance. Another is color of the ceiling, since the bounced lighting will take on that color. I'm not familiar with Lite Scoop; I use a Lumiquest Pocket bouncer or a Lumiquest 80/20 (ceiling bounce/lumiquest bounce) depending on the type of ceiling. I like the 80/20 because the 20% helps fill in any shadows that result from a full ceiling bounce.

Honestly direct flash these days is very good (if the ceiling is too high and/or the wrong colour) as long as you can get a ‘near enough’ balance to ambient (and don’t get too close to the subjects), it doesn’t have to be exact, all you have to do is set an appropriate f-stop (fairly fast) and ISO (no less than 400, 800 if necessary to get the ambient balanced better) and It’ll be a breeze, grab a couple of victims and practise a bit on them with indoor direct flash I think you will be surprised. HSS might show up on the rear flash panel but that’s ok as the camera flash will still use either normal flash or HSS depending on the shutter speed that ends up being set, if the ambient is bright it’ll be HSS and a high shutter speed, if the ambient is low then it’ll be most likely sync speed and full power flash (then you might have to set a -1/3 flash balance).Greg